Our second excursion at Bahía Bustamante was a trip to the nearby petrified forest. We drove about an hour across a landscape that looked much like eastern Montana or Wyoming except for the dozens of ñandú and guanacos we spotted along the way. Our destination was the base a cliff where fossilized pieces of wood were slowly being revealed by the dry and windy climate. We were told that most of it comes from trees that were alive about 65 million years ago.

As a kid I remember finding small pieces of fossilized wood and plants during my summers in Montana but this place was different. There were dozens of intact tree trunks laying all over the ground. Many of them had a bark-textured surface that was remarkably similar to a real tree. I kept picking up pieces out of disbelief that they were actually rock and not real wood. Of course, the weight of each piece was a bit of a giveaway! While most of the pieces were an reddish color there were a few there and there that were blue, green and yellow. Apparently this is caused by different trace elements mixing with the quartz in the fossil.